Handheld electronic devices, such as personal digital assistants (PDAs), mobile phones, digital cameras, and the like, offer mobility and a variety of services to their respective users. They are typically configured to transmit and receive data to and from other devices via a wired or wireless connection. Most mobile phones, for example, can provide Internet access, maintain a personal address book, provide messaging capabilities, capture digital images, as well as place phone calls.
Many devices, in particular mobile phones, can identify their respective locations within a certain range depending on the device and location identifying technique. Some devices can use sophisticated position determining systems, such as a Global Positioning System (GPS). The GPS is a satellite-based radio navigation system that uses signals from three or four satellites to compute the current latitude, longitude and elevation of a GPS receiver in the device anywhere on earth down to within a few meters. Other devices can use a location identifying technique based on which base station is servicing the device, that is, the location of the device is within a range of the base station from which a call is made. Other devices can use location identifying techniques based on triangulation between the device and at least two base stations.
The device's location, typically represented by geospatial coordinates, can be used in a variety of ways. It can be used to describe a digital image captured at the location and it can then be stored as metadata for categorizing the image. The location can also be used to link other information with the location, such as a favorite restaurant or bookstore.
As stated above, the location is typically represented by geospatial coordinates. Geographical information systems (GISs) exist that map geospatial coordinates to street addresses or location names. Accordingly, the street address or name corresponding to the geospatial coordinates can be displayed to the user and/or utilized by an application in the device, e.g., to associate the name with an image.
While providing the street address or name of a location can be helpful, e.g., to orient a user or to categorize a set of images, the street address or name itself can hold little or no relevance to the user. For example, if the user has forgotten the name of a particular business, the address of the business is not particularly useful.
One way to address this would be to allow the user to assign a relevant name for the location manually. For example, the user can name a location based on a favorite store, e.g., “Starbucks,” at that location, or based on a class, e.g., Calculus, the user is attending at that location. In this manner, the location name can be personalized and relevant to the user. This solution, however, requires the user to think of and to enter a name for each location, which can be tedious when several locations need to be named and when the most appropriate name might not be readily apparent to the user.